Regardless of how many news stories, ads, or posts I tell it to hide, FB remains clueless about my tastes. It will suggest I join groups I just left, buy products I just bought, recommend befriending people I never heard of.

It's well known that Putin funds both far-right and far-left extremists to increase social divisions in the West. Cuba has also funded or blackmailed American activists before. Anyone notice how Alex Jones hates the US military, for someone who calls himself a conservative patriot?

People who don't sleep much may annoy their partners and have fewer babies. Similarly, there is no selective pressure against Parkinsonism, diabetes, or heart disease, since people rarely die from them before having children.

Retail music stores have disappeared, MTV has faded into irrelevance, so how does anybody know what the "top charts" are anymore? In all seriousness, where does one find these? There are a million web sites all claiming to have authoritative lists. Also, with the recent availability of unlimited streaming, I have experienced an explosion in diversity of musical tastes in my mid-40s. I no longer have to take chances on albums or individual tunes I might not like -- I can listen to a hundred different artists in one day.

Similar claims have been made about how human anatomy allegedly conforms to mathematical constants. But when we make actual measurements of individuals, nobody fits the constants perfectly. What is the allowed margin of error? One can make just about any number be close to some "elegant" mathematical constant -- pi/2, pi^2, e/phi, whatever.

Similarly, today I just judged a paper about childhood obesity submitted to a scientific journal. Childhood obesity is confounded with low socioeconomic status, so how do we separate the two? Of course, children of lower socioeconomic status have poorer outcomes in terms of health, occupation, and mortality. (Incidentally, the children with the worst outcomes in terms of future health, income, and mortality are the underweight kids who look like walking skeletons. Most scientific papers on obesity exclude that population.)

Yes I did. There were a few thousand responses that fit on a single spreadsheet, and after an hour spent coming up with buckets and keywords for them, I couldn't find any exceptions from the above. I'll keep an eye out for future changes, though I doubt they will change much. I know the hospitals and their problems.

I agree that more broadly worded questions require more sophistication. I've looked at word combinations and so forth, though I haven't really needed to use them yet in analyzing health care data. We would not trust a computer to parse a full doctor's report, no matter how sophisticated the software; that will require manual inspection, often by multiple people to agree on a consensus interpretation.

Substance addicts will often spontaneously quite their habit when the pain of continuing the habit becomes greater than the pain of quitting. A year ago, I had severe stomach pains and was hospitalized for 3 days. I figured the chewing tobacco was upsetting my stomach, so I went cold turkey. As it turned out, it had nothing to do with the tobacco -- it was intestinal colitis. Anyway, I'm off of nicotine permanently now.

When mathematicians vote on whether to accept a new theorem, when psychiatrists vote on which diseases should be included in the latest version of DSM, when NIH panels vote on whether to fund a grant. No, science couldn't possibly be run by the tyranny of the mob that refuses to believe in ideas that are too new and radical.

I graduated at the end of the Cold War ('93), so an engineering degree was worthless -- all the companies were laying off their engineers as quickly as possible. Combined with the fact that the engineering jobs I interned for or heard about were not very interesting (managing a chemical factory?), I got a liberal arts degree. I went into IT for about 10 years, but in the long run I just didn't care that much about the mechanics of computers. I eventually got a PhD in biostatistics after taking the prerequisite courses. Statistics has let me get into various different research projects without having to overspecialize. I work for a hospital system now and do different research studies every day.

Growing up in the 1970s, there were many books by reputable scientists who were absolutely sure that the Earth will have mega-famines and enter an Ice Age by the year 2000. They were absolutely certain that no economic growth will ever occur in China or India, the Cold War will last a thousand years, and air pollution will require everyone to wear oxygen masks at all times.